5 ms·

P.A. Semi PA6T PowerPC

88 points by picture 4y ago

chrsw 4y ago
Site not loading for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
zitterbewegung 4y ago
The only logical buyer if Apple didn’t purchase them is either Motorola or IBM if they were to only be competitive in the embedded systems market. If they were never purchased given the rise of ARM processors they could have actually started making those for the mobile phone market instead and probably would have been competitive to Qualcomm .
- rektide 4y ago
  They shouldnt have sold. They should be competing with AMD & Intel & Apple. You also have the wrong market segment. This was supposed to be a 25w chip with crazy high i/o. Dual 10Gbit, plenty of pcie & sata... back in 2006... at low power, all integrated... this chip was supposed to be a dara pushing monster. Maybe they could have scaled down but the intent was obviously different, to deliver performant extremely well integrared embedded & bigger cpus.
  - classichasclass 4y ago
    When rumours of a PowerBook G5 circulated, this was the chip that was most frequently mentioned, even though it wasn't actually a 970.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    > You also have the wrong market segment. This was supposed to be a 25w chip with crazy high i/o. Dual 10Gbit, plenty of pcie & sata... back in 2006... at low power, all integrated... this chip was supposed to be a dara pushing monster. Most of that stuff was a result of their very impressive integrated northbridge, but they never publicly demonstrated any CPU that could actually drive all that bandwidth. Supposedly they had plans to eventually ship a 16 core processor that would really use all of the I/O bandwidth, but they never manufactured anything more than a 7w, dual core part. The Amiga X1000 only featured a single 1 GigE port. So it’s not like they sold when they had a revolutionary monster ready to dominate the market sitting in warehouses. They had long-term plans, but they may have been starting to doubt the feasibility of executing them, or being relevant by the time they’d scaled the architecture up to sixteen cores, by the time Apple came along.
    - rektide 4y ago
      I think of Ryzen as the first modern chip that has a multipurpose serdes, but here's PA Semi kicking out this [1] on their first & only chip: > The device also integrates a flexible I/O subsystem that supports eight PCI Express controllers, two 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers and four Gigabit Ethernet controllers that share 24 configurable SERDES lanes. It's interesting that you highlight the cpu as such a limiting factor: > they never publicly demonstrated any CPU that could actually drive all that bandwidth. Agreed that the plans to scale up cores were very interesting & promising. But the other ultra-notable features of this ultra-integrated badass SoC monster (the one that shipped) was that it had a colossal crossbar powered DMA engine. In many applications the cpu could serve as control plane, & the rest of the chip could act like a data-plane, shipping data around. The northbridge can happily pipe gobs of ethernet over to your SATA system, semi-autonomously. At the time that usually took special carefully tuned code to pull off, I imagine. I like to think today we'd be able to use this DMA engine far more readily- io_uring for async io, all manners of dma-buf linux capabilities for managing device-side memory, plenty of dma engines & offloads in various kernel drivers. Direct device to device communication has continued to be underscores as a huge way to u leash computing, and wow, PA Semi dedicated gobs of die-space to the task way back then. Such a huge huge pity such a promising new competitor just vanished. > They had long-term plans, but they may have been starting to doubt the feasibility of executing them, They indeed ran hotter than expected & core performance was not nearly what was hoped for. According to various LKML posts of people who had dev boxes. Still, so impressed. Tons of brilliant innovation. A little more runway to get off the ground before being torn apart & swallowed by a titan would have been great. [1] http://vita.mil-embedded.com/news/p-processor-ever-designed/ http://vita.mil-embedded.com/news/p-processor-ever-designed/
      - wtallis 4y ago
        > I think of Ryzen as the first modern chip that has a multipurpose serdes, Do you mean specifically that Ryzen was the first CPU to offer that kind of IO flexibility? Because Intel desktop chipsets were doing that kind of thing long before Ryzen hit the scene. Here's are chipsets for Haswell and Skylake: Haswell: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7963/FlexIO.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7963/FlexIO.png Skylake: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9582/122%20-%20HSIO%20H.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9582/122%20-%20HSIO%20H.jp...
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- oddity 4y ago
  The mobile phone market wouldn't have saved them. Qualcomm killed off everyone who wasn't Apple with their licensing schemes. The CPU tech was largely irrelevant because what really mattered was the wireless patents. Being acquired by Apple was probably the best outcome, and we have PA Semi to partially thank for the rise of ARM processors as we consider it today.
andrekandre 4y ago
its interesting to think about what would have happened if apple hadn't switched to intel by then... would they have bought them and stayed ppc the whole time? would macs have gotten as popular (without bootcamp/intel compatibility) as they are today?
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  The PowerBooks were so far behind in performance at that point that Apple would have had to figure out something else if they hadn’t gone to Intel. If not Intel switch, Macs would not have had the popularity surge — that was driven by the idea that, worst case, you could still run Windows full time if you had to. It might not have mattered as much once the iPhone was out, but it probably would have increased the pressure for non-Xcode dev tools for the iPhone.
  - lproven 4y ago
    I don't think that's entirely true or fair. G4 Powerbooks were very usable and are still highly collectable today. I have two G4s myself. Yes, Intel kit was somewhat quicker, in some tests, some of the time, but bear in mind the comparison at the time: Intel's state of the art then was the Pentium 4. The P4 had a nickname of being a fanheater, because it ran so hot and had such a low IPC that its performance even at high clock speeds was poor. AMD was just bringing in Sledghammer, the Opteron/Athlon64 range, but they were not laptop chips either. So that meant that they were up against the G5 as a desktop chip, which was respectable. The things you are missing are: * Apple saw that laptops were more important than desktops. POWER was strong and still is, but as a server chip, not in portables. * Apple was sold on the promise of future Intel chips, mainly the Core 2 series, and nothing Intel had at that time... * ... or that AMD had at that time. * There is another big advantage that is forgotten now that Apple saw then. PowerPC was Apple's old platform. The pre-OS X OS, Classic, ran on PowerPC. OS X could run Classic in a VM on PowerPC. This was good for long-time Apple users. But if it switched to Intel, notably the future 64-bit Intel chips that didn't even exist yet, then it would lose the ability to run Classic in a VM... but it would gain the ability to run x86 OSes natively in VMs. In other words it could run Windows in a VM at near-full-speed, giving the ability to run Windows apps, which looking to the future was far more important than the ability to run old PowerPC Classic MacOS apps. It was 100% not an issue of "Apple compared Intel to PowerPC and Intel was quicker." At the time of the comparison, Intel was slower and hotter.
sitkack 4y ago
Interesting panel discussion featuring Daniel Dobberpuhl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgLYm2YYfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgLYm2YYfg I know there are thousands of unsung engineers that drive the progress of technology, but it is amazing how a few folks seem to have this outsized influence. In no way I am saying that they alone are responsible, but it does make me curious about the actual topology of innovation.
- oddity 4y ago
  The semiconductor world is very small by tech standards, and so there are correspondingly many fewer people at the management or upper IC levels that can coordinate large, consequential decisions and even fewer that become well known. Even ignoring attribution biases, it should be unsurprising that there are a few folks that seem to have outsized influence. But I will say that there are many more people who are not well known outside of the semiconductor world, but are minor legends within it. Unfortunately, the development processes for hardware tend to go through enough hands to strip attribution and most hardware people tend not to talk in public about their accomplishments. Doesn't help that some of the main companies have been stagnant and absorbed in inner and outer turf wars for nontechnical reasons. It's not a great environment for stars to shine. On top of that, most software people I've seen seem uninterested in understanding and dissecting the hardware enough to appreciate what they've done. If that's the case for software people, I have no hope for anyone else.
sydthrowaway 4y ago
Rivos is the next PA Semi. You heard it here first
- wmf 4y ago
  In what sense? They're going to fail and get acquihired? By whom?
- msbarnett 4y ago
  The company up to its neck in lawsuits for urging hires from Apple to xerox documents on the way out the door?
tambourine_man 4y ago
Site is down and not cached yet by Google, Internet Archive, etc If anyone has the content, there's at least one very curious HNer here :)
- christoph 4y ago
  Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220605234940/https://www.cpushack.com/2022/06/05/cpu-of-the-day-p-a-semi-pa6t-powerpc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220605234940/https://www.cpush...
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    Nice, thanks. Didn't show up for me
tambourine_man 4y ago
I remember quite well hopping for a PowerBook based on what PA Semi was rumored to be making. I was devastated when Steve dropped the Intel bomb. The PC industry was destined to standardize on the most mediocre architecture, brute forced into a high performance chip due to sheer economies of scale. DEC and Sun where no more and even Apple had to give in if it wanted a different fate. Thankfully, the mighty cell phone saved us all from boredom and we're living interesting times in CPU land again.
- lproven 4y ago
  * hoping It's a different word (/ˈhoʊpɪŋ/) from "hopping" (/ˈhɒpɪŋ/) with a different meaning. :-)
  - tambourine_man 4y ago
    Thanks! Yeah, I know, but I suck at typing and spelling. And yet, I chose a profession that’s just basically what I do all day.
- snvzz 4y ago
  There's a lot going on with RISC-V; several companies are working on high performance microarchitectures. It is good to have some excitement again.
- apple4ever 4y ago
  I was just like you, and still am haha. I loved PowerPC, and was very hopeful for PA Semi. They took it in a different, but still interesting direction.

88 points by picture 4y ago

chrsw 4y ago

Site not loading for me.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

zitterbewegung 4y ago

The only logical buyer if Apple didn’t purchase them is either Motorola or IBM if they were to only be competitive in the embedded systems market. If they were never purchased given the rise of ARM processors they could have actually started making those for the mobile phone market instead and probably would have been competitive to Qualcomm .

rektide 4y ago
They shouldnt have sold. They should be competing with AMD & Intel & Apple. You also have the wrong market segment. This was supposed to be a 25w chip with crazy high i/o. Dual 10Gbit, plenty of pcie & sata... back in 2006... at low power, all integrated... this chip was supposed to be a dara pushing monster. Maybe they could have scaled down but the intent was obviously different, to deliver performant extremely well integrared embedded & bigger cpus.
- classichasclass 4y ago
  When rumours of a PowerBook G5 circulated, this was the chip that was most frequently mentioned, even though it wasn't actually a 970.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  > You also have the wrong market segment. This was supposed to be a 25w chip with crazy high i/o. Dual 10Gbit, plenty of pcie & sata... back in 2006... at low power, all integrated... this chip was supposed to be a dara pushing monster. Most of that stuff was a result of their very impressive integrated northbridge, but they never publicly demonstrated any CPU that could actually drive all that bandwidth. Supposedly they had plans to eventually ship a 16 core processor that would really use all of the I/O bandwidth, but they never manufactured anything more than a 7w, dual core part. The Amiga X1000 only featured a single 1 GigE port. So it’s not like they sold when they had a revolutionary monster ready to dominate the market sitting in warehouses. They had long-term plans, but they may have been starting to doubt the feasibility of executing them, or being relevant by the time they’d scaled the architecture up to sixteen cores, by the time Apple came along.
  - rektide 4y ago
    I think of Ryzen as the first modern chip that has a multipurpose serdes, but here's PA Semi kicking out this [1] on their first & only chip: > The device also integrates a flexible I/O subsystem that supports eight PCI Express controllers, two 10-Gigabit Ethernet controllers and four Gigabit Ethernet controllers that share 24 configurable SERDES lanes. It's interesting that you highlight the cpu as such a limiting factor: > they never publicly demonstrated any CPU that could actually drive all that bandwidth. Agreed that the plans to scale up cores were very interesting & promising. But the other ultra-notable features of this ultra-integrated badass SoC monster (the one that shipped) was that it had a colossal crossbar powered DMA engine. In many applications the cpu could serve as control plane, & the rest of the chip could act like a data-plane, shipping data around. The northbridge can happily pipe gobs of ethernet over to your SATA system, semi-autonomously. At the time that usually took special carefully tuned code to pull off, I imagine. I like to think today we'd be able to use this DMA engine far more readily- io_uring for async io, all manners of dma-buf linux capabilities for managing device-side memory, plenty of dma engines & offloads in various kernel drivers. Direct device to device communication has continued to be underscores as a huge way to u leash computing, and wow, PA Semi dedicated gobs of die-space to the task way back then. Such a huge huge pity such a promising new competitor just vanished. > They had long-term plans, but they may have been starting to doubt the feasibility of executing them, They indeed ran hotter than expected & core performance was not nearly what was hoped for. According to various LKML posts of people who had dev boxes. Still, so impressed. Tons of brilliant innovation. A little more runway to get off the ground before being torn apart & swallowed by a titan would have been great. [1] http://vita.mil-embedded.com/news/p-processor-ever-designed/ http://vita.mil-embedded.com/news/p-processor-ever-designed/
    - wtallis 4y ago
      > I think of Ryzen as the first modern chip that has a multipurpose serdes, Do you mean specifically that Ryzen was the first CPU to offer that kind of IO flexibility? Because Intel desktop chipsets were doing that kind of thing long before Ryzen hit the scene. Here's are chipsets for Haswell and Skylake: Haswell: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7963/FlexIO.png https://images.anandtech.com/doci/7963/FlexIO.png Skylake: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9582/122%20-%20HSIO%20H.jpg https://images.anandtech.com/doci/9582/122%20-%20HSIO%20H.jp...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
oddity 4y ago
The mobile phone market wouldn't have saved them. Qualcomm killed off everyone who wasn't Apple with their licensing schemes. The CPU tech was largely irrelevant because what really mattered was the wireless patents. Being acquired by Apple was probably the best outcome, and we have PA Semi to partially thank for the rise of ARM processors as we consider it today.

andrekandre 4y ago

its interesting to think about what would have happened if apple hadn't switched to intel by then... would they have bought them and stayed ppc the whole time? would macs have gotten as popular (without bootcamp/intel compatibility) as they are today?

KerrAvon 4y ago
The PowerBooks were so far behind in performance at that point that Apple would have had to figure out something else if they hadn’t gone to Intel. If not Intel switch, Macs would not have had the popularity surge — that was driven by the idea that, worst case, you could still run Windows full time if you had to. It might not have mattered as much once the iPhone was out, but it probably would have increased the pressure for non-Xcode dev tools for the iPhone.
- lproven 4y ago
  I don't think that's entirely true or fair. G4 Powerbooks were very usable and are still highly collectable today. I have two G4s myself. Yes, Intel kit was somewhat quicker, in some tests, some of the time, but bear in mind the comparison at the time: Intel's state of the art then was the Pentium 4. The P4 had a nickname of being a fanheater, because it ran so hot and had such a low IPC that its performance even at high clock speeds was poor. AMD was just bringing in Sledghammer, the Opteron/Athlon64 range, but they were not laptop chips either. So that meant that they were up against the G5 as a desktop chip, which was respectable. The things you are missing are: * Apple saw that laptops were more important than desktops. POWER was strong and still is, but as a server chip, not in portables. * Apple was sold on the promise of future Intel chips, mainly the Core 2 series, and nothing Intel had at that time... * ... or that AMD had at that time. * There is another big advantage that is forgotten now that Apple saw then. PowerPC was Apple's old platform. The pre-OS X OS, Classic, ran on PowerPC. OS X could run Classic in a VM on PowerPC. This was good for long-time Apple users. But if it switched to Intel, notably the future 64-bit Intel chips that didn't even exist yet, then it would lose the ability to run Classic in a VM... but it would gain the ability to run x86 OSes natively in VMs. In other words it could run Windows in a VM at near-full-speed, giving the ability to run Windows apps, which looking to the future was far more important than the ability to run old PowerPC Classic MacOS apps. It was 100% not an issue of "Apple compared Intel to PowerPC and Intel was quicker." At the time of the comparison, Intel was slower and hotter.

sitkack 4y ago

Interesting panel discussion featuring Daniel Dobberpuhl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgLYm2YYfg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgLYm2YYfg I know there are thousands of unsung engineers that drive the progress of technology, but it is amazing how a few folks seem to have this outsized influence. In no way I am saying that they alone are responsible, but it does make me curious about the actual topology of innovation.

oddity 4y ago
The semiconductor world is very small by tech standards, and so there are correspondingly many fewer people at the management or upper IC levels that can coordinate large, consequential decisions and even fewer that become well known. Even ignoring attribution biases, it should be unsurprising that there are a few folks that seem to have outsized influence. But I will say that there are many more people who are not well known outside of the semiconductor world, but are minor legends within it. Unfortunately, the development processes for hardware tend to go through enough hands to strip attribution and most hardware people tend not to talk in public about their accomplishments. Doesn't help that some of the main companies have been stagnant and absorbed in inner and outer turf wars for nontechnical reasons. It's not a great environment for stars to shine. On top of that, most software people I've seen seem uninterested in understanding and dissecting the hardware enough to appreciate what they've done. If that's the case for software people, I have no hope for anyone else.

sydthrowaway 4y ago

Rivos is the next PA Semi. You heard it here first

wmf 4y ago
In what sense? They're going to fail and get acquihired? By whom?
msbarnett 4y ago
The company up to its neck in lawsuits for urging hires from Apple to xerox documents on the way out the door?

tambourine_man 4y ago

Site is down and not cached yet by Google, Internet Archive, etc If anyone has the content, there's at least one very curious HNer here :)

christoph 4y ago
Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20220605234940/https://www.cpushack.com/2022/06/05/cpu-of-the-day-p-a-semi-pa6t-powerpc/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220605234940/https://www.cpush...
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Nice, thanks. Didn't show up for me

tambourine_man 4y ago

I remember quite well hopping for a PowerBook based on what PA Semi was rumored to be making. I was devastated when Steve dropped the Intel bomb. The PC industry was destined to standardize on the most mediocre architecture, brute forced into a high performance chip due to sheer economies of scale. DEC and Sun where no more and even Apple had to give in if it wanted a different fate. Thankfully, the mighty cell phone saved us all from boredom and we're living interesting times in CPU land again.

lproven 4y ago
* hoping It's a different word (/ˈhoʊpɪŋ/) from "hopping" (/ˈhɒpɪŋ/) with a different meaning. :-)
- tambourine_man 4y ago
  Thanks! Yeah, I know, but I suck at typing and spelling. And yet, I chose a profession that’s just basically what I do all day.
snvzz 4y ago
There's a lot going on with RISC-V; several companies are working on high performance microarchitectures. It is good to have some excitement again.
apple4ever 4y ago
I was just like you, and still am haha. I loved PowerPC, and was very hopeful for PA Semi. They took it in a different, but still interesting direction.